June 17th 2025: Indo stupor

Coming back to Dunedin after a few weeks in the tropical islands of the Mentawai Island chain feels a bit like waking from a bad dream. It's hard to recalibrate to the wild cold of Dunedin. I haven't had a surf yet. I'm not that brave just yet. It will have to be very good for me to pull the wetsuit on and dive in. 

When I reflect back on the trip we had I realise that we completely scored the best of it all. Of the three trips I have done that one topped the charts ... and all three have been outstanding. One of the key things this time was our hunger to surf new waves and properly explore new parts of the archipelago. With a lot of swell running throughout that meant we could really go searching. We managed to avoid crowds most of the time – nearly all of our surfs were just our crew with waves completely to ourselves. 

The modern surfing world has evolved to a point that places like Bali and the Gold Coast can be frustratingly crowded when conditions are good. Even in places as remote as the Mentawais, there can be a lot of pressure on certain waves. The big named ones are all bucket list items for many surfers, which makes them even busier, while unnamed waves nearby can be deserted. That played into our hands very well. 

We got into a bit of a pattern of making up names for the waves we surfed – which makes it very tough for people to find them. Our crew was pretty handy at learning the nuances of the new waves as well. The Roberts boys George and Frank, Reuben Lyons and Keo Morrison were the young guns and they nearly always led the charge (and sometimes tested the reef first). Paddling out in the pre-dawn dark to a new spot with Scuzz cracking the whip is a sometimes spooky quandary. Especially with sets arriving anywhere from 3-8 foot. Some of the spots really needed the right angle swell and were a little more challenging with a few degrees off centre.

The shots in this week's edition all come from the middle of our trip when the swell abated for a few days and the haziness of a week floating on the Indian Ocean brought with it a comfortable kind of stupor. 

See you at the beach, Derek

PS Congrats to local surfer Alexis Owen for winning the Connor Jones Group Emerging Talent Award at the Otago Sports award. You can watch Alexis Owen in action alongside Keo Morrison and Lewis Murphy (among others) in this wee film we made over summer: Rising Tide.